Free The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James Page A

accessory. In Karnataka, you could get six months for smoking.
    Fat lot of good to claim innocence when the whole of Karnataka begged to differ. Of course my mother and Leela said no such thing, nor did I. Mostly we kept our commentary to
How are you?
and
What can we bring you?
We well knew the answers, but there was such yearning in those thirty minutes, such blind desperation as the time ran dry.
    At one point he turned his red eyes on me. “What happened to your nose?”
    “Nothing.” My hand went to my nose, where a welt remained from last month’s bout. “I punched someone.”
    “You?”
    “Why not me?”
    “Over what?”
    Leela pierced me with a look. I had lied to both her and my mother, but one glance at my ramshackle face, and Leela had known.
    “Mugged.” My mother sighed. “Can you imagine? In the broad light of day.”
    As the years went by, we drew hope from whatever lightlesscorner we could. When the newspapers told that Karnataka would pardon a lotteried pick of prisoners on November 1, in celebration of the state birthday, we waited for lots that were never drawn. When Jayan dismissed his lawyer, we hired another, but they were mosquitoes, those people, always buzzing in your ear and at the same time bleeding you dry.
    By the time Jayan was freed, I was a young man of nineteen, my hopes for college on hold. I had told myself I would pursue my degree as soon as Jayan came home, but I had not foreseen what captivity could do to a man over the course of four years.
    All his swagger and ease had worn off. He had a guarded look about him, the flinch of a hunted thing. He slept all day and smoked all night, as if to make up for the bidis he could not buy in prison. He was both familiar and strange to us, as we must have been to him.
    I avoided my brother, but the women handled him more delicately. My mother moved around him with care, and Leela rushed to his side if he so much as belched, as though he were a spill about to run off the table’s edge. She tacked his name to the end of every sentence as if to remind him of it.
    One night I heard him talking to Leela in a voice mean and muttery. She wanted him to go with her to temple for the Sita Devi Festival, the grandest hullabaloo for miles, but Jayan was in no mood. “I might as well have THIEF tattooed on my forehead, that is how everyone looks at me.”
    “So let them look. We have nothing to hide now. All the time you were gone I kept my chin up. I worked. I bent my knee for no one.”
    “Who gave you the cow and the chickens?”
    “I bought them.”
    “With what money?”
    She paused. “My wedding chain.”
    A long, vast silence.
    “You should have left,” he said.
    “And go where? Who would have me?”
    “Your sisters.”
    “They would have my money but they would not have me.” A muttering from Jayan. “You know why. And anyway, they can’t give me children.”
    I heard my brother carefully clear his throat.
    “I am tired of waiting,” she said. “You promised me a life.”
    Jayan said nothing. Her voice shifted to a different key, all soft and wanting as she asked,
Should I be more specific?
… thus leading to the sort of commentary that robbed me of sleep.
    As the months sped on, Jayan seemed to grow into a sturdier self. He resumed his work in the fields, and I often went with him, leaving Raghu behind. Even when Raghu invited me to watch
Junior Mandrake
at his house, on their brand-new LG TV, I said I was tired, having worked beside Jayan all day, Jayan who never tired or paused for a drink.
    “But it’s starring Jagathy,” Raghu said. “You like Jagathy.”
    “I like my bed better.”
    Raghu rubbed one skinny foot with the other. “You never help out at our place anymore.”
    “You already have enough help.”
    “Well, Father says you have to sit in the palli with me tonight.”
    “Tonight? I’m too tired.”
    “Not too tired for that pumpkin of yours.” He raised his voice loud enough for my mother to hear.